Katharina Wagner's production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at the Bayreuth Festival (premiere 2007)
Katharina Wagner rehearsing for her debut at the Bayreuth Festival with a new production of Die Meisteringer von Nürnberg (premiere 2007).
A DVD documentary about Katharina Wagner's Meistersinger debut was released in 2008.
Das Blut, es wallt mit Allgewalt, geschwellt von neuem Gefühle. Walther
von Stolzing (Klaus Florian Vogt) sings for the mastersingers.
Photo: Bayreuther Festspiele/Jochen Quast
Walther von Stolzing (Klaus Florian Vogt) and Beckmesser
(Michael Volle) - both superb - in Katharina Wagner's production of Die
Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Act 1.
(Photo: Bayreuther Festspiele/Enrico Nawrath
Was deutsch und echt, wüßt keiner mehr: Norbert Ernst (David)
and Carola Guber (Magdalene) with twelve German masters.
Photo: Bayreuther Festspiele/Jochen Quast
A documentary about Katharina Wagner's Meistersinger
Reviews etc.
Not only is the intellectual underpinning of the production thought-provoking and largely convincing, the show is also full of stunning theatrical spectacle, especially in Act III. A less satisfactory aspect, however, concerns the Personenregie, or lack of it. By this I mean the director's craft of working with the singer-actors to develop their characterization through line-by-line assimilation of the text and score--above all, working as an ensemble on the kind of detailed character interaction that is the stuff of true Wagner music drama. This, it seems to me, is a serious weakness at Bayreuth at the moment. For all the intellectual input into this production of Die Meistersinger, and for all its brilliantly imaginative theatricality, the level of Personenregie remained disappointingly low.
Barry Millington in Opera Canada
- Associated Press (2008)
- Boulezian blog (2008)
- International Herald Tribune (2007)
- Mostly Opera (2007)
- Jim Pritchard (2007)
- The Stage (Penelope Turing)